Notebook

By Michael Henderson

12:01AM BST 13 Sep 2005

Enough, Miss Alibhai-Brown: this is cricket

The most familiar sound of a Sunday morning, it was once said, rather uncharitably, was that of Harold Hobson, the drama critic, barking up the wrong tree. Today any canine parallel would surely involve Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, identified quite correctly in Tom Utley's column last week as one of the major pests of our age.

Shrill, humourless, basted in self-importance and yet utterly unaware of how others see her, this hectoring zealot was in mid-summer form yesterday. An England victory over Australia's cricketers, she droned, would represent a victory for the worst sort of nationalism. Oh dear, haven't we heard all this before? Incidentally, odd, isn't it, that so many metropolitan scribblers who rabbit on about "nationalism" - Cristina Odone is another - are those who know least about this nation?

In Miss Alibhai-Brown's estimation, the 23,000 spectators at the Oval, and the millions who watched on television and listened on radio, are hankering after a sense of England that no longer exists, if it ever did. It's just as well she wasn't there to hear a ropy tenor belt out Jerusalem, amid the general merriment, otherwise the poor old girl might have started blubbing. How dare these people celebrate the appalling mistake of being English?

Of course, there is always another view. One arrived on my mobile phone shortly after three o'clock from a French friend who was watching the cricket in a Hammersmith pub. It read: "How magnificent is this? And what a privilege to live it."

It's not only the French, either. Scottish and Irish cricket-lovers (yes, they exist) have rallied behind Michael Vaughan's team, with good cause. They see in players like Andrew Flintoff those old English qualities of modesty, fortitude and grace that one finds rather more often in the shires than, say, the Groucho Club. So, as we raise a glass to those splendid cricketers, let us also toast the muddle-headed madam Alibhai-Brown - and have a jolly good laugh.

Even in the midst of an eventful Ashes series - the most eventful Ashes series - the mind wanders to more refined things - books, plays, operas.

Rupert Christiansen wrote an interesting piece in the Telegraph arts pages last week about his urge to revisit great productions, bragging that he had seen the recent staging of Schiller's Mary Stuart three times. I intend to catch it when it transfers to the West End next month, and if it is half as good as the Don Carlos with Derek Jacobi earlier this year, it will be money well spent. Until messrs Flintoff and Warne began to paint the summer in their own image, Jacobi's was the performance of the year.

What Christiansen didn't mention are those supposedly great or very good works that are not worth seeing a second time, and sometimes not worth catching at all. Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor must be the most boring opera ever composed. Any play by Bertolt Brecht is a challenge that does not necessarily have to be met, and I am surely not alone in regarding the much-lauded Tate Modern as a horrible place stuffed full of pseuds. As for writers, Faulkner and Bellow, Nobel laureates both, are unreadable. There is an important lesson here: we must avoid approved lists.

Flintoff has been the man of the summer, indeed of the year. When one considers the petulance of our footballers (is Wayne Rooney flesh and blood, or a character invented by Craig Brown?), Freddie's big-heartedness stands out like a beacon. Sometimes the good guys do come first.

He is a star all right, but stardom is not evident to everybody. Having been invited to appear on the first show in the new series of Parkinson next month, Flintoff had to decline because he will be out of the country. His agent offered an alternative date, only to be told his client wasn't needed in late October. Oh well, they can always send for Charlotte Church.